What Do You Look For In A City Setting?

[Guest Champsguy]

Re: What Do You Look For In A City Setting?

 

It's really good for capturing a Silver Age feel. Some of the major streets are named after comic book writers. There's a superhero-themed restaurant (kind of like Planet Krypton from Kingdom Come) called Champions. There's an over-abundance of heroes (like Marvel's New York), but you can spread all those out to other cities.

 

The rest of the Mutants and Masterminds line is worth a look, too. Freedom City is a seperate continuity, but I still liked the other stuff. You get a lot more Silver Age stuff (like Soviet cyborgs, and Atomic Nazis) than you do in Champions. Sometimes it gets a little "eh", but when their stuff is good, its really good.

[zornwil]

Re: What Do You Look For In A City Setting?

 

Freedom City is pretty cool, I haven't yet spent much time on it but actually now that you mention it, it's one of the few settings I've bought.

[Theron]

Re: What Do You Look For In A City Setting?

 

Potential and Flavor.

 

To me, Potential means story idea jumping off the page and demanding that I flesh them out (but not telling me HOW they need to be fleshed out). It means there's room for the PCs in the setting as the stars of the show.

 

To me, Flavor means the writers understand comic book tropes and embrace them. This was where I found San Angelo rather unsatisfying, in that it was a very complete setting, but the it devoted too much detail (IMHO, YMMV, etc.) on things like how the city sanitation department works and not enough on being colorful. But that's a matter of taste.

 

FWIW, my two favorite published cities are Green Ronin's Freedom City and Bay City (from C:NM). My favorite unpublished one would be my own Meridian, but that's cheating.